koreywill

2003 ES300 with lots of miles Had a hard time getting CDs out of the player yesterday but the 2 that were in finally came out. Later, I discovered the protective door that moves when you push eject or load is set at a 45 degree angle and does not move at all when pushing either button. There are no noises occurring when I push either button. "WAIT" flashes on the lcd screen for about a half of a second but then disappears. Tried to insert a CD but the player didn't "grab" it and pull it in. I kept pushing until almost in, nothing happened with load or eject, and then I chickened out and pulled the cd out. There was considerable drag when I pushed the CD in and when Ipulled it out. AM, FM, and cassette player still work but the CD player does nothing. These are not homemade CDs.
I do not believe there are anymore cds loaded but I tried the "hold eject down while hitting the side of the dash" fix and nothing came of that.
Any suggestions?

Arsenii

Hello,

CD Changer is a pretty complicated, hence fragile mechanism, trying to forcibly push or pull a CD into it can result in some misadventures.. At this point, it seems like the only option is to get the unit out and take it apart to see if there is something jamming the mechanism or if something got clipped out of alignment. Those do jam once in a while, so this issue is well described, here is a link to one of the threads.

Hope this helps and best of luck!

koreywill

Hey Arsenii,
Thanks for getting back to me with the link. Funny thing on mine is there is no error message whatsoever. I was hoping that might be a clue. One of these days I'll yank it out and tear into it. I've done the same on other cars (some succesfully, some... never mind) so it shouldn't be too bad.
If anyone else has a thought or two I'm open to ideas.
Again, thanks.

hjjj321

Have you found any fix? I'm experiencing the same

koreywill

I have not yet gotten to it. I know it's been a while but life got in the way. I'm going to try pulling the fuse first to cut off all power to the radio. I'll wait for a while , plug the fuse back in, and see if the cd player resets itself. When I find a solution (if I do) I'll be back.

koreywill

Well, I finally got a chance to start messing around with the CD player in my 2003 ES300. The door seemed to be stuck in a halfway position and the unit would neither accept or reject any CD's. I got to reading a whole bunch of threads and they mostly referred to "ERROR 3". I didn't have that so I sleuthed out the problem.
At first I thought I could do a reset (key NOT in the ignition) by removing the change box (above the left knee) to gain access to the fuse box. I pulled fuse #37 10amp #39 20amp, and #60 25amp. These are numbers directly from the 2003 Lexus Owner's Manual for an ES 300 on page 335 through 339. Those are all related to some part of the sound system. Doing all that change nothing so don't bother.
I started looking at the fuse box under the hood. Using the book and the inside of the fuse box I found that fuse #14, marked D.C.C. and fuse #27 marked ALT both had something to do with the sound system. I went ahead and pulled #14 (again, key NOT in ignition) and tried to pull #27 which is a plastic box with a small fusible link at the bottom center. I tried different ways to remove it but I felt I was going to destroy it before it came out. So forget that!
After about 20 minutes I put fuse #14 back in, got in the car, inserted the key, and turned it to the "ON" position. The radio came on (with all the presets intact) and the CD player started churning with a bunch of noises. After a few minutes, the CD door closed. I went and got a CD, pushed "Load", the door opened up, the CD went in and started playing. Hallelujah!!! Mission accomplished. Try it. It may work for you.

SHORT VERSION OF SOLUTION TO STUCK CD DOOR: Pull fuse # 14 marked D,C.C. in your engine bay fuse box, wait 15 minutes, put the fuse back in, put the key in the ignition, turn to "ON", and see if your CD player works once again. This procedure did it for me.

Yeah, I know I'm wordy.

Good luck!